Sarah Allen approached Pivotal back in December wanting to host a Palm webOS hack session. She knew that there was curiosity among the San Francisco Rails community about the platform and wanted to have a hands-on coding day where they could learn.

And so it happened this past Saturday. Pivotal hosted in our downtown SF offices. Palm sponsored, which meant about a half-dozen Palm employees attended to help out…oh, and give every attendee a copy of Mitch Allen’s O’Reilly book and a phone (Sprint Pre or Pixi).

While our previous events were more presentation + Q&A, thanks to Sarah Allen, this event was much more hands-on. I kicked off with a presentation and live coding, then we had lunch, then spent the afternoon hacking.

Overall I think it went well (see the Twitter search #webosworkshop). The crowd was a focused group of (mostly) Rails developers who were curious about the platform. I got lots of help during the live coding session (despite our failed monkey patch of JavaScript’s String prototype). People paired up and worked on projects together, proving that webOS is an easy platform to pick up if you’re a Rails developer. I expect a few new apps for Palm in the coming weeks.

We recorded my presentation & coding session, so we’ll post that in a few days along with my slides. Unfortunately we didn’t tape the live demo of Palm’s Ares, their in-browser development environment. But there’s a nice tutorial video on their portal. Other posts:

• Sarah posted her notes
• Palm’s Lisa Brewster posted her awesome photos